RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/economist-softpedaling-islam-bruce-bawer/

Yes, sprawling Muslim families on lifelong welfare are draining the treasuries of Western Europe. Muslim imams rule ever more imperiously over sharia enclaves in major cities from Manchester to Marseilles to Munich. Muslim youth gangs have turned ever-expanding sections of those cities into war zones and caused increasing numbers of Jews to flee the continent. And Muslim husbands who keep multiple wives at once and treat them like property – while forcing their daughters into arranged cousin marriages – have made a joke of Europe’s supposed devotion to human rights and sexual equality.

But never mind! Banish your worries! For years, that most smug, supercilious, and self-important of glossy newsweeklies, The Economist, has been taking a special interest in Islam, and especially on the phenomenon of Islam in the West. And for years it’s been assuring us that Islam shouldn’t trouble our little minds – that any problems incorrectly associated with it have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam itself; that most of those problems are, when you examine them dispassionately, our fault in one way or another; and that in the long run everything will be just fine.

Why does The Economist’s take on this topic matter? Because the mag, ubiquitous on international flights between leading business hubs, arguably exudes even more of an air of obnoxious authoritativeness – of absolutely definitive definitiveness – than the New York Times.

Its secret? While other long-lasting periodicals like Time fade in significance (and try to stay alive by running ever more inane, sensational nonsense), The Economist, based in the two top global cities, London and New York – and publishing its articles in a language that is its own unique, precious cross between British and American English – postures itself as having taken the high road.

Marketing itself to upscale readers as a calm, cool, preternaturally sober-minded compendium of objective reporting from every corner of the earth (and its lack of bylines makes every sentence sound like an ex cathedra expert statement), The Economist has garnered a reputation as an indispensable source of trustworthy information for serious cosmopolites who consider it their responsibility as citizens of the world to stay well-informed.

Consequently, The Economist’s perennially reassuring pontifications on Islam have had a meaningful – and deleterious – impact.

Its logic on the subject seems always to have been more or less as follows: economies are all-important; globalism is all-important; open borders are all-important; and sooner or later, inevitably, dollars to doughnuts, all those gazillions of Muslim immigrants in the West – or their children, or maybe their grandchildren – will go off the dole, pour into the workforce, and, at long last, provide Western European employers with a vast and wonderful supply of cheap labor. And what a beautiful day that will be for the global economy!

My awareness of The Economist’s line on these matters dates back to 2006, when I published While Europe Slept, my book warning about the threat of Islam in Europe. In their review, the mag’s anonymous scribes looked down upon it with a world-weary sigh.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twists-and-turns-add-doubt-to-haitis-assassination-investigation-11628071201?mod=cxrecs_join#cxrecs_s

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—After he climbed the bloodstained staircase, Carl Henry Destin found a baffling scene.

The Haitian president lay dead on the floor, with multiple gunshot wounds. Every drawer was flung open, and papers were scattered as if someone had been searching for something.

“The bedroom had been totally ransacked…documents everywhere,” Mr. Destin said. “There were a lot of witnesses, but they didn’t want to talk.”

Mr. Destin, a judicial officer often tasked with logging evidence at a murder scene, counted dozens of bullet holes and their locations at the presidential residence. He was struck by the chaos of the scene and the thin recollections from the bystanders who described little more than hearing the clatter of gunfire.

Outside, police frantically halted traffic as they searched for Colombian mercenaries they said had been running through the narrow streets of the hillside neighborhood.

Nearly a month after Haiti’s 53-year-old head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, was killed on July 7, the circumstances remain just as murky, with no shortage of suspects and speculation—and more new questions than answers. Complicating matters: key investigators, including Mr. Destin, are in hiding, saying they are being threatened and fear for their lives.

Haitian police have implicated more than 40 people in a plot to kill the president of one of the world’s poorest countries, in a conspiracy they say ran from working-class towns in the high Colombian Andes to the Miami suburbs.

But no clear motive or mastermind has emerged in the investigation.

In a jail near the country’s airport are 18 former soldiers from Colombia suspected in the plot; another three are dead after police said gunbattles broke out in the hills of the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince.

The men deny killing the president, and say they were on a lawful drug-enforcement mission and were set up to take the blame. One Colombian suspect in custody told a visiting human-rights lawyer that the president was already dead when he arrived on the scene.

Police have also detained a barely known Florida-based Haitian-born preacher who they say attempted to install himself as Haiti’s interim ruler. Haitian politicians say they have never heard of the man.

Several senior police officers, including Mr. Moïse’s own security chief and members of his detail, have been arrested. No one has yet explained how the attackers so easily entered the residence and carried out the crime.

The following account is based on more than a dozen interviews with legal officials, political advisers, diplomats, judicial officers and lawyers briefed on the investigation, and several currently under arrest, including Jean Laguel Civil, the head of presidential security.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed WhatsApp messages among some of the suspects and audio recorded during a private planning meeting involving the Colombian ex-soldiers. Documents recording testimony given by key witnesses and photos taken during and after the chaotic melée that led to the death of the president were also reviewed.

The information, which includes details that haven’t previously been reported, adds to questions about the official outlines of the investigation.

“I really don’t trust any immediate leads of what we’ve heard so far,” said Georges Fauriol, a Haiti expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. “The story simply doesn’t add up.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-deal-jcpoa-military-biden-ebrahim-raisi-11628101285?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mohammad Khatami, an affable, intellectual cleric who believed in the Islamic revolution but wanted more humanity and democracy in government, unexpectedly won the Iranian presidential election on May 23, 1997. His victory marked the beginning of the Western left’s conviction that the clerical regime was evolving into a less religious and oppressive system.

But that isn’t panning out. Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric renowned for his ruthlessness, became president this week and is the apparent successor to Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. Joe Biden may be forced to answer a question presidents have preferred to avoid: Would Washington use force to stop the development of Iranian nuclear weapons? American presidents since 2002, when the Islamic Republic’s clandestine atomic program was revealed, have declared that Iran’s possessing such arms is unacceptable.

President Biden appears unprepared to unleash the U.S. Air Force, and the administration can’t plausibly argue that opening up more trade hurts the theocracy’s aggressive, Islamist ambitions. This leaves few options beyond economic penalties. The White House probably doesn’t appreciate the irony of its now reportedly contemplating leveling more sanctions on Tehran to coerce Mr. Khamenei to re-enter the nuclear deal, after Mr. Biden and his Iran team derided the sanctions diplomacy of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, with its sunset clauses and nonchalance about aggressive inspections, made sense as an arms-control agreement if the accord was merely one step in a process. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has, in his own way, stated exactly this, endorsing the need to make the agreement “longer, stronger, broader.” That wouldn’t be necessary if the JCPOA actually stopped, as former Secretary of State John Kerry put it, “all pathways” to the bomb and did something about the theocracy’s ballistic missiles and imperialism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17611/iran-rouhani-presidency

[W]ith the Iranian economy on its knees and the country facing further international isolation, Mr Rouhani finds himself leaving office with his reputation in tatters and the ruling Islamic regime facing a desperate battle for survival.

Mr Raisi’s victory in Iran’s indisputably rigged elections in June should be seen not so much as a victory for the country’s ultra-conservative supporters of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a desperate attempt by regime hardliners to protect the Islamic revolution from mounting unrest.

So, far from being the president that transformed Iran’s fortunes for the better, Mr Rouhani will forever be remembered as one of the most disastrous leaders in the country’s history.

When Iranian President Hassan Rouhani leaves office today, Thursday, he will do so in the knowledge that his eight-year term has been little more than an abject failure, both at home and abroad.

Back in 2013, when the 72-year-old Mr Rouhani became Iran’s seventh post-revolutionary president, his central campaign pledge was to improve the country’s economic well-being. In addition he promised to adopt a more liberal approach to domestic policy while seeking to forge a more constructive engagement with the outside world.

Eight years later, with the Iranian economy on its knees and the country facing further international isolation, Mr Rouhani finds himself leaving office with his reputation in tatters and the ruling Islamic regime facing a desperate battle for survival.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of Mr Rouhani’s years of catastrophic misrule is that he is to be replaced by Ebrahim Raisi, known universally by Iranians as the “Butcher of Tehran.”